I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a wholly different item then a sign. I suspect it is a air direction turbine, perhaps at Hickham, Tripler or Pearl. Flight times, air speed and direction would have been important to pilots of the day. Looking closer at the sign, (and after a few hours of additional thought) it's 9 hours to Los Angeles, so could this have been at the Honolulu International Airport?

Crossroads of the Pacific is a generic term used then and didn't only apply to the Kau Kau Korner....

Blackhawk Films apparently made travel slides from their travel films for home use in the 1950's...

Thoughts?

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It's a fun sign, not just as an icon of Honolulu history, but also fun to see what locations are considered significant at the time, and how they change over time. In the WWII photo, they've got Saipan on there, but not on some of the others. DC's most recent image has an arrow for Petropavlovsk??!

Quote:

On 2012-01-21 06:03, Dustycajun wrote:

Not to sidetrack on this one, since it really looks like a different thing, but I'd just add that the directions are clearly not supposed to be accurate either. I don't think there's any place on earth where you could have those directions for pointing to Los Angeles, Rio, and Tahiti from the same origin. Probably just entertainment value anyway. It is kind of fun when they try to be roughly accurate like the Kau Kau Corner sign though.

I picked up this nice little matchbook from the Kau Kau Jr. It was a hamburger stand opened by Sunny Sundstrom, the owner of the original Kau Kau Corner.

The building was designed by Pete Wimberly and was described as follows: “The Kau Kau Jr. hamburger stand on Nimitz Highway (1956), with its little glass kitchen huddled beneath a fantastical, arrow-shaped, concrete-slab roof was certainly Honolulu’s most fanciful small building.”

I tried finding a photo of the building to no avail. May Phillip Roberts could help out on this one.